By the late 2010s significant majorities in rich countries expected their children to be worse off than themselves. The future had ceased to be a place of hope. Instead it became as much a place of fear, where jobs would be destroyed by robots, our minds would be enslaved by machines and power would drift out of people's direct control.

The most important task of social innovation is to rekindle a sense of power, a sense that we are able to shape and create a future in which we would want to live. That in turn depends on the ability to see and imagine alternative possible futures that can guide us to action. In this part I look at how this is to be done, starting with the future of social innovation itself before turning to how we should think about the future in a much broader sense.